Mr. Wilks picked the bag up and followed humbly into the house. Then he lost his head altogether, and gave some colour to his superior officer’s charges by first cannoning into the servant and then wedging the captain firmly in the doorway of the sitting-room with the bag. “Steward!” rasped the captain. “Yessir,” said the unhappy Mr. Wilks. “Go and sit down in the kitchen, and don’t leave this house till you’re sober.” Mr. Wilks disappeared. He was not in his first lustre, but he was an ardent admirer of the sex, and in an absent-minded way he passed his arm round the handmaiden’s waist, and sustained a buffet which made his head ring. “A man o’ your age, and drunk, too,” explained the damsel. Mr. Wilks denied both charges. It appeared that he was much younger than he looked, while, as for drink, he had forgotten the taste of it. A question as to the reception Ann would have accorded a boyish teetotaler remained unanswered. In the sitting-room Mrs. Kingdom, the captain’s widowed sister, put down her crochet-work as her brother entered, and turned to him expectantly. There was an expression of loving sympathy on her mild and rather foolish face, and the captain stiffened at once. “I was in the wrong,” he said, harshly, as he dropped into a chair; “my certificate has been suspended for six months, and my first officer has been commended.” “Suspended?” gasped Mrs. Kingdom, pushing back the white streamer to the cap which she wore in memory of the late Mr. Kingdom, and sitting upright. “You?” “I think that’s what I said,” replied her brother. Mrs. Kingdom gazed at him mournfully, and, putting her hand behind her, began a wriggling search in her pocket for a handkerchief, with the idea of paying a wholesome tribute of tears. She was a past-master in the art of grief, and, pending its extraction, a docile tear hung on her eyelid and waited. The captain eyed her preparations with silent anger. “I am not surprised,” said Mrs. Kingdom, dabbing her eyes; “I expected it somehow. I seemed to have a warning of it. Something seemed to tell me; I couldn’t explain, but I seemed to know.” She sniffed gently, and, wiping one eye at a time, kept the disengaged one charged with sisterly solicitude upon her brother. The captain, with steadily rising anger, endured this game of one-eyed bo-peep for five minutes; then he rose and, muttering strange things in his beard, stalked upstairs to his room. Mrs. Kingdom, thus forsaken, dried her eyes and resumed her work. The remainder of the family were in the kitchen ministering to the wants of a misunderstood steward, and, in return, extracting information which should render them independent of the captain’s version. “Was it very solemn, Sam?” inquired Miss Nugent, aged nine, who was sitting on the kitchen table. Mr. Wilks used his hands and eyebrows to indicate the solemnity of the occasion. “They even made the cap’n leave off speaking,” he said, in an awed voice.